I was able to show off some of the work I've been doing on embedding data-driven graphs/charts in the Web versions of in-progress academic writing: d3.js generating SVG tables in the browser, but also saving SVG/PDF versions which are used as figures in the LaTeX/PDF version (which I still need for sharing the document in print and with most academics). I need to write a brief blog post describing my process for doing this, even though it's not finished. In fact, that's a theme; we all need to be publishing code and writing blog posts, especially for inchoate work.

Also, I've been thinking about pseudonymity in the context of personal websites. Is there anything we need to do to make it possible to maintain different identities / domain names without creating links between them? Also, it may be a real privacy advantage to split the reading and writing on the Web: if you don't have to create a separate list of friends/follows in each site with each pseudonym, then you can't as easily be re-identified by having the same friends. But I want to think carefully about the use case, because while I've become very comfortable with a domain name based on my real name and linking my professional, academic and personal web presences, I find that a lot of my friends are using pseudonyms, or intentionally subdividing

Finally, I learned about some cool projects.

Indiewebcamp IRC logs become more and more featureful, including an interactive chat client in the logs page itself

P.S. While last time I RSVP'ed I worried that these irrelevant posts in my feed were needless, I ended up getting multiple emails with really valuable responses (about hiding certain types of posts and about the academic writing on the web project in general). So I'm persuaded not to worry urgently about hiding them from my index page or feed.

Sure, I'm in for tonight's Homebrew meeting. I don't have a ton of progress to report, but I've been working on academic writing that can be simultaneously posted to the Web (where it can be easily shared and annotated) and also formatted to PDF via LaTeX. Oh, and I'm excited to chat with people about OpenPGP for indieweb purposes.

P.S. While I like the idea of posting RSVPs via my website, it seems a little silly to include them in RSS feeds or the blog index page like any other blog entry. What are people doing to filter/distinguish different kinds of posts?

While privacy was not the most common topic at #indiewebcamp earlier this summer, I think the independence of controlling one's own Web presence has a lot in common with freedom from surveillance.

In that spirit, I thought you all might be interested in the 1984 Day rally, taking place this Sunday, 1pm (after the Doctor Who live stream, of course) on the Embarcadero. The Web page for the event suggests, apparently without any irony at all, RSVPing on Facebook, but I thought an email/blog post was a more appropriate way to tell you all that I'll be there. Daniel Ellsberg (of the Pentagon Papers) will speak, among others.

Hope you're well and to see you soon,
Nick

P.S. Can you RSVP to an event within the description of an event itself? Test case: the paragraph above.

Of course, this email slash blog post is also an attempt to RSVP using the proposed microformat and WebMention. We'll see how it goes, of course, as this sort of indieweb interoperability isn't something one can easily test within the isolated safety of one's own environment.

Implementing is of course the best way to find bugs. For example, wouldn't it be great if WebMention explicitly noted that the mention operation is idempotent so that I wouldn't feel bad about repeating the WebMention POST when I re-generated my static site content?

All that aside, nice meeting this week. Let's have more of these RSVP-able events in the Bay.
—Nick